Episode 340 - Is Cosmos Dead? A critical look with Zaki Manian

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week I chat with zucky Manion about the cosmos ecosystem and I ask the question is Cosmos dead we run through the key events in Cosmos history and map the teams and players who worked on the project during different eras we

tease out the strengths of Cosmos but also the structural flaws that have led it to be in the state it is today there is a key distinction and one that I hope comes through during this episode Between the cosmos Hub and the cosmos dream and one may be faltering but I think you can tell by the end of this the other is unlikely to ever die we wrap up with a chat about some of the initiatives in place to try and revive the ecosystem and bring different factions and Cosmos together towards the central goal now before we kick off I want to point you towards the ZK jobs board there you can find job opportunities to work with top teams in ZK I also want to encourage teams looking for top talent to post your jobs there as well we've been hearing from

more and more teams that they have found excellent Talent through this jobs board so be sure to check out out the ZK jobs board we've added the link in the show notes also a quick reminder our by annual ZK Summit event is hosting its 12th edition in Lisbon on October 8th our one day ZK focused event is where you can learn about Cutting Edge research new ZK paradigms and products and the math and cryptographic techniques that are giving us epic efficiency gains in the realm of ZK the early bird tickets are sold out but we still have General tickets for sale over at ZK summit.com I've added the link in the show notes hope to see you there now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors today's episode is sponsored by enoma intents are a new way to build

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and now here's our [Music] episode today I'm here with zaky co-founder of s Miler and a long standing member of the cosmos ecosystem welcome back to the show Zaki it's great to be here for today's episode we return to the topic of Cosmos and I want to do a catchup last time you were on was February 2023 and I think we were talking about like Adam 2.0 and what was hopefully coming for Cosmos I want to do a brief look back at the history of Cosmos but I really want to understand if as many are saying online Cosmos is now dead I'm not doing a big intro to you because you have

actually been on the show many times but I think over the years I've very much considered you one of the main champions of Cosmos and I think your influence has been really widespread you are kind of legendary for having advised like most of the main projectss in Cosmos so I feel like you're the right person to talk to about the state of this ecosystem well I've been part of the ecosystem uh in many ways since like 2014 wow Cosmos is a very very old project uh and I think it's often forgot about because most people encountered it in 2019 or 2021 during the Tera era these were the touch points uh for different

people but I've been at this idea of interoperable blockchains of proof of stake of all of these things for a decade wow and uh it does feel like we're at another inflection point so it's a good time to catch up let's do a quick mapping or sketch of like the key dates in Cosmos so launch of the network 2019 yes like what actually launched then was that like a full validator set yeah so it was the adom Hub yeah okay so there was this event called game of stakes which was the first incentivized test net which the team executed and sort of IED that process and like sort

of unleashed the incentivized testnet monster upon the world which we've seen ever since yeah so you know all of these intensified test Nets that airdrop Hunters are um and we never promised anyone anything but we ended up doing like a reward for the participants that was baked into Genesis and so the validator set got you know there was a release of software the validator set got together they launched a network um and so Adam was born and what was probably notable was Adam was like the first proof of stake Network that get widely integrated both on the staking Side by Major centralized exchanges oh wow so that was kind of the the big story of 2019 was kind of this process of different exchanges

onboarding adom and wallets and all of these different players onboarding Adam as okay this is an asset you can earn yield on and that was kind of a pretty New Concept in the centralized exchange world was there already a POS live was tesos live tesos was live okay so it wasn't the first first but it was like in the first five or something yeah I mean tezos had all of its early strugg all of its struggles right all all of this all the drama that happened with uh their foundation and everything and so Adam was able to execute a very strong go to market the token was pretty widely listed we you know had a policy of not really engaging with centralized

exchanges but nevertheless the demand for the token was very strong um so lots of exchanges listed us then this whole process of of staking Integrations you know coinbase made it I'm pretty sure their first staking integration so that was like a pretty big factor yeah and so like this like very decentralized community of validators were operating the network but at the time it was just the Hub so Cosmos literally consisted of like one chain no connections it was only like that first part of the vision yeah there were no were there any other Cosmos chains at the time yeah so I guess at the time so first and foremost there was this other chain called Iris oh yeah which is mostly forgotten at this point

yeah um but that chain launched at the same time you know madic which became polygon um was also alive running running you know they started as a tender chain there's still a tender chain today oh I didn't know that actually that's funny and then B&B chain um also launched very the binance chain yeah yeah you you find the tender code kind of everywhere um because it is this sort of very well understood uh implementation of a bft consensus algorithm um and it is very stable H although but just going back though 2019 you're not seeing the full vision of Cosmos it's just a stand like Cosmos itself the atom was just a standalone

chain yeah all it did was allow for transfer and validation basically staking I mean and so like what was going on behind the scenes very much though before launch everyone was focused on one thing then we launch then we have this asset this asset is worth billions of dollars even just in the early days and there was always a lot of conflict in the team okay there was always a lot of different Visions there was always you had you had this incredible pool of talent that was working together Jay Ethan Sunny Chris go me you know Jack samplin like you had this pool of talent that have all gone on to build lots of things um and so the

incredible pool of talent but they were all pulling in different directions and it was like keeping them all line but really you know a huge tax on cos from in the beginning was there was not a lot of alignment um you know the company at the time was all in bits yes but was the ICF already formed the ICF existed okay the ICF so by the time of launch we were sort of in the state where Jay was running Allin bits I was at Allin bits and Ethan was running the foundation notionally and that he was building a team there and then over the course of 2019 Ethan left being Opera Al in charge of the foundation started informal

systems the fragmentation of Cosmos contributors was already baked in and it was like a thing that we were trying we were trying to manage um but there were all of these people like the people who were drawn to build Cosmos were the people who's like yeah I don't have to do what anyone else says like it was not like we are all going to work for Adam wow it was always like I can build like I want this thing to exist so I can build my own thing okay 2020 early 2020 I remember seeing you this is pre just before Co SBC and all this crazy [ __ ] I think you weren't there anymore you had left all in bits I'd resigned from all

in bits publicly called out Jay there was a moment where it really looked like this ecosystem is imploding yeah it it really did so basically most of the team then left all in bits started their own many of them started their own entities a big chunk of people then started working directly for the interchain foundation MH there was also interchain game Bea different org right a it's a corporation okay which has an extremely weird structure um but it is a German company that is owned by the ICF oh so it is in the same umbrella yeah I always thought of it as independent but it

always so there was a Berlin office for all in bits mhm and Berlin office all resigned and they resigned and they like went under the interchain foundation but with like their own with a considerable amount of Independence what was clearly lacking was a leadership team at that entity okay but the interchain G Bea that was the team that eventually shipped IBC right it did ship IBC what happened to all in bits around this time so all in bits went through like a couple of iterations so there was like the immediate post Crisis Intervention then this early contributor named pong took

over as CEO and Jay stayed on the board but left still the still had the majority shareholder like control of the NTI but pong so then there was the pong era um this was pre IBC so there's the and in this era there was an attempt for everyone to work together okay so like I had left I was just working basically for you know under my validator entity occlusion and doing my own thing you know the The Advisory business started to expand so invest advised business started to expand but you know most we working on shipping IBC you know we did an whole episode about this but one of the things that was really painful was all of these centralized exchange had

integrated adom and then as part of shipping IBC we were making substantial changes to the code base the other thing that happened is there was this team called regen which has a chain that is like again not super famous but you know exists within the cosmos they actually took over as maintainers of the cosmos SDK and so now you so like you you had the patterns that I think have been problematic for Cosmos get sort of cemented in this era which is all of the core contributors have their own projects yeah all of their own core contributors have their own teams there are variety of different teams no one has any uh value alignment like

alignment around Adam like very few people have very few people are contributing own atoms have atoms some of us do like I have a bunch of atoms um from like the early fundraiser days and stuff like that but like again no alignment around an asset and like most entities are kind of ad hoc groups of people who kind of were like okay like we have to figure this out before we miss a payroll cycle like let's just like put an entity together W this is the leadup though to the Stargate upgrade yeah and that actually I did an episode all of these I'm going to add to the show notes but this one was I think I interviewed three different people to talk about this Stargate upgrade yeah that was the launch of IBC yes this

happened in 2021 yes so you made it through like spite this fragmentation it got there yeah despite all of this we shipped IBC was terara already alive before was alive IBC okay what was it doing itself was it just a standalone thing terara had been pitched as a payment rail okay in um South Korea then they had pivoted to doing defi but as a standalone chain kind of unusual at the time yeah and they had partnered with Wormhole um which is a bridge Network also early Cosmos people um to connect themselves to a bunch of other chains um

in like a early pre IBC system was like Adam in Tara then like was there was no Bridge of Adam into terara okay there was no relationship and Tara like did not care about Adam and could have cared less yeah but they ended up eventually so then I think it was May or June of 2021 uh osmosis launched yes so sunny and Dave launched osmosis and then ter decides to enable IBC ah so like osmosis launches and there's not really anything to do on osmo except trade osmo for Adam trade a move stuff over IBC which is cool yeah but then Terra launches and we get this massive injection of liquidity

into the ecosystem as like Tera has this like massive fan base massive user base and like a huge Advantage for terara was that adom was widely available on many centralized exchanges so was that the link into Tera is that how people got Tera yeah so that was a big part of how people got like you could buy Adam buy Luna buy us on osmosis so that opened the can of worms but before it got sour there was this moment of like incredible growth like you you'd see new chains launching like weekly like lots of air drops it's funny cuz like the airdrop hunting era I think

for a lot of people is more the 2023 era but I remember beginning of 2022 or late 2021 early 2022 Cosmos chains so many Cosmos CH cosmos had air drops before anyone else air drops are very easy to execute within the code um we kind of baked that in we also baked in this idea of you just would have a token you basically launch an idea mhm okay and you have a token and there is a massive graveyard of all of those chains too like most of them didn't work some of them worked for a little while like Juno yeah but it's it's been a disaster like like just like I mean you you basically all of these to tokens are down yeah or

dead or down or fully gone or fully gone yeah yeah so there's only I mean of that time what launched stargaze still around stargaze is still around Juno I don't even know is that's still around Juno was around that time it still exists it still exists s samier yeah anything else agoric was around that time and then there was a lot of random I actually don't remember their names even so many so much WoW gravity Bridge gravity Lum you know just like all kinds of things so like we had this cosmoverse yeah at the end of 2021 and oh that was so fun this was in Lisbon in Lisbon yeah that kind of like

you know I have a house here I like spend a bunch of time living in Lisbon now that was my first int uction to Lisbon such a special month that was also like pretty early after Co era so like and I remember it was first it was the cosmoverse I think it was first cosmoverse cosmoverse and break break point no but there was an ethereum thing too there was eth Lisbon too and there was lizon yeah there was so it was like a it was actually like a full month maybe even six weeks where every single week a different ecosystem came to town it was very cool so that 2021 mhm and like basically a lot of the next couple of years of Cosmos kind of got sketched out

then basically it was the first time that teams were meeting face Toof face post IBC and people starting to figure out how will this IBC thing actually work what are our relationships with each other like what is the businessto business community of Cosmos look like we have all these Sovereign chains and they're all sending you all trading on osmosis and everything but like what is this actually how does this all fit together that was November 2021 mhm you know so we were all trying to make sense of this stuff yeah we all had a very difficult relationship with Tara okay like it like it was fueling a lot of the Tera was fueling everything okay because people were buying atom on exchanges to

get into the ecosystem so once they be having the atom maybe they'd hold a bit of the atom or they'd put it into other projects most of it though was going towards Tera because they and the reason were like they would offer what was it like 20% apy on apy and it was like pretty consistent unlike a lot of the other things like urine where you'd have like really high apy and then it would drop it was just all artificially sustained by their you know by this like sort of Leverage that doesn't look like Leverage that was built into the instability of the US mechanism on Luna and like all of these bail out so there's all this drama right like you know a lot of us didn't looked at the US mechanism we were like this is unsound like this thing has a

huge death spiral risk but you know it was also the only it was the thing that was keeping breathing life into the ecosystem we all were starred for resources to write like build any of the things that were needed to build uh wallets to build block explorers to build everything and so we were all also trying to get resources from them it's interesting like IBC launching at that time so far there's never been like a big bug in IBC has no there's been a big bug in IBC oh there has been yeah so why don't we why don't we get to that point of the story what year when is that pre- Luna post Luna that's so let's do Luna quick yeah so Luna crash is May 2022 yeah it sets off the CRA all of the

crashes it's the first I think right it's the first thing that destabilizes everything yep $60 billion gone yeah and actually I want to really highlight this episode we did in 2023 cuz you go into a lot of detail in that one on like the play byplay of Luna crashing for this episode I just want to kind of briefly say like what did it do in the immediate aftermath like so in the immediate aftermath like liquidity and Cosmos collapsed yeah just catastrophically like it was just gone it wasn't even like people exited like it was all in Luna and then it was Zero yeah and it was just like did anyone get anything out like was there an attempt like did anyone like settle into Adam yeah they get into Adam and just stay there or did

everyone like move out whatever they could most people would happen too fast whoa just wipe out so yeah so the EOS I mean like and the ecosystem has never economically recovered um but like also like we now no longer had a stable coin defi in the ecosystem became essentially non-existent um we were we were really like the whole ecosystem like there was just because like basically what was the ecosystem at the time was there were a bunch of chains but it was like there was Adam which was like this token that didn't really do much but it was listed in exchanges MH everywhere and you could stake it there was osmosis where you could do like Unis swap Style Trading and there was Tera which had like the

stable coin and anchor but then like a bunch of other stuff like apps launching and stuff like that there was like a lot of activity and so like you know once once Terror was gone that whole structure just was destabilized wow wow so this destabilization and it's not I mean the cosmos hit was early and hardcore and fast but the rest of the market gets hit over and over and over again by other things yeah then FTX happens there's also like Bridge hacks and yeah culminating in FTX yeah the final like pin that just let it all crash down Cosmos during that time did it experience actually the same level of

crashing as the rest of the market after that initial L Luna thing it continued to feel rough just rough um I speak about this like I'm not in it like I you know we have a validator we for a long time were very high in the validator set so we are also obviously seeing this happened but it's funny to to map it out so near the end of 2022 there is a new proposal that comes about okay so let's talk a bit about the fragmentation at this point like who are the players at the end of 2022 after the Luna crash so Luna is gone Lun or like Luna is gone and the refugees have not really

coordinated into anything uh that will come later you know the builders in the Luna EOS system some of them came over and start like wanted to build stuff in Cosmos but very little had launched so it was really like there was osmosis there was informal systems there was occlusion zucky there was Jack with strange there was the interchain gmbh team uh there was the interchain foundation there was binary Holdings B Holdings didn't really become a player until later okay they had been a validator yeah so but okay I thought that they were already so we had uh we had regen okay what happened is all in bits not even a yeah so at this point then in 2022 Jake came back fired this is at the

end this is like mid like post Luna collapse post Luna but pre- atom 2.0 pre- atom 2.0 Jay comes back during the summer okay Jay tends to be more active during the summer okay he has this weird seasonality to his behavior and so he tends to be more active during the summer as he comes back during the summer uh another round of people getting fired from all in bits happens another round of like Pung leaves there's like a whole another round of drama but it's like very self-contained cuz like the rest of us are off dealing with Terror collapsing okay huh but like we there still is like an energy mhm there's like there's an energy despite all of the collapsing I guess there is

this hope that because there was some really interesting building happening in terara there it had attracted not only money but also Talent yep and those folks still understood tender at least so like they understood kmm which our smart con we had a lot of people who had been building with kmm and there's like kmm has been weirdly sticky like developers who build Who start who got exposed to it like don't want to leave so they keep looking for places to build that's been like weirdly sticky cosmism as a smart contract language it was like this Niche smart contract language that got was never really like organized that like Cosmos would have its official smart contract language be cosm there was a hackathon project and then some of the devs from that hackathon project

kept building it it was kind of not going anywhere then terara adopted it Without Really asking them they just adopted it and suddenly this created entire Builder Community around it and that has like weirdly persisted okay but so like at that moment late 2022 there is energy there's a bunch of teams who seem to like still care yeah there's a sense of like you know we've had a rough year but can we turn it around but also October 2022 we find a massive bug in IBC oh that's the bug and that's IBC buxy I always thought it was a cosmos hub no it was a it was it was a full drain everything double spin but we found it so what had happened this is

dragonberry this is called dragonberry okay and who named that The Hacker no no no you found you found a bug so Dave Dev Dev from on the osmosis team so what happened was binance is a bridge between um that they used for BNB the asset was based on Cosmos Tech they literally used a bunch of code in Cosmos Tech that Jay had written for a hackathon oh mhm and like not cosm WM this is IBC was this was code in tender okay okay so they' written their own Bridge not using any IBC Tech okay but using this like prototype of IBC that Jay wrote for

hackathon and the rest of us had like I I mean I had looked at it and been like I wouldn't use that code but okay like whatever move on so someone had hacked that bridge for like 50 million and so like I remember I was in New York I was like walking down the street uh going to meet Shane from stargaze for Sri Lankan food and I'm like scrolling Twitter as I always do and I see Sam CZ son from Paradigm uh tweeting about this binance hack and he's like halfway through it and I'm like and I realized that it was a vulnerability in like Cosmos related Co code so I called him and I'm like you have to stop

tweeting I need to go figure out if there's any effect but why it wouldn't be though right because if they're using they're not us I didn't I hadn't like put all these pieces together so I'm just like I like leave dinner with Shane I'm like sitting on a stoop in the East Village in New York on my on GitHub on my phone like tracing out the code and I'm like okay IBC doesn't use this code it was like weird Jay's weird hackathon code you're safe we're safe but then we're like as always happens like half of the cosmos devs that are like sort of core Cosmos devs are like on a plane while this is all going on I couldn't get in touch with anyone so I'm just like doing this by myself uhhuh so that happens but then the next morning everybody wakes up and we're like well

all right this is the the bug was fairly exotic fairly unique to our code base we should go look and see if there's anything like this in IBC okay and then that starts a 72-hour bug hunt that like a bunch of people contribute to and we have a bunch of near misses and then Dave finds like a full exploit exploit whoa I mean it's it's this it's was the first of and then you know I I don't want to spend the entire time doing the timeline but like cuz we got to talk about the philosophy of this thing but anyway so we find the exploit um and then we start this frantic effort to get all of the

networks patched it was like 1 72-hour Zoom call whoa where we like ran a war room and we would just call up the validators on different chains and we would be like we would just patch people's code without telling them call their validators say it would be like zucky and Ethan have told you stop running injective start running this ver variant of injective on pure trust whoa uh and so we like ran around we we patched all of the cosmos chains yeah no no funds were lost why dragonberry so I mean so at the time we were using fruit names okay for bugs for bugs okay for security vulnerabilities we were we were

using and like it seemed like a big big one the big one it's a weird one it's exotic yeah we were like you know it was like but I think the entire The Experience created this at least within me the sense of crisis in the software development of Cosmos oo you're saying like why was that allowed to like why didn't they find it why in the name of God did this actually get through our software development process had it been Incorporated later or was it a very old bug so the bug was in the original IBC implementation it been there from the beginning but it showed a lack of capacity in our auditing proc like all

of the things that you know I had been a part of in you know the rigor in which we had launched like built the cosmos Hub launched everything it was just fragmenting because of the fact that you had like it was no longer one team it was like well although it hadn't been for like two years at this point yeah and it's like one team is writing IBC another team is a is like auditing IBC different parts of the code are owned by different people so like you know it was like one team owned this part of the code was not even part of the IBC team there were just all of these you know you had like this fragmentation of development and it was like clearly we have a problem right around the same time fall 2022 Adam 2.0 yeah I mean I remember it

as a as a something to vote on in the hub it was a signaling proposal as far as I could understand included in it was sort of like what IC this interchange security would mean but so yeah there had been this product for the cosmos Hub that had been proposed in 2022 then shipped till 2023 called this idea of interchange security IC yeah yeah and so actually the first so the way Yelena who's the founder of CEO of noble and founder co-founder of noble and I got close and like started working together was I was helping her with go to market for IC for IC maybe just briefly ICS is a bit of like it's funny I just did an episode recently on reaking and it's a

bit like it's the first reaking primitive yeah it's it also had a bit of an echo of polka dot with like the Hub being the center and then chains branching off it yeah so you know and we had bought onboarded Neutron and stride in 2022 stride is a liquid staking token that had already existed as an app chain we' onboarded them you know they were going to join and itam 2.0 was really an attempt you could say it was basically an attempt to like redo the Ico I think wow if you would want to ask like what the question was was it like going to redistribute like it was going to redistribute a massive amount of atoms wow it was a huge restructuring proposal of a dramatic nature wow and because if

you wanted to get most of the core Builders back on the same page back aligned around Adam back aligned around like on on one team essentially this is what it was going to take and when Adam 2.0 failed basically the fragmentation of the ecosystem accelerated and just like a note because the last episode that you came on to talk about this at the time Adam 2.0 had been voted down but it was just a signaling proposal but you sounded still pretty positive about it like was there a sense even after the signaling didn't work that like maybe it would still happen you know we had

people had voted you know a lot of people had expressed hey like we like parts of Adam 2.0 but we want a more incrementalist approach dydx had announced that they were building their Cosmos chain I knew at the time I don't know what was public at the time I knew that usdc was coming oh yeah you know I was bullish about the celestial launch you know it was February 2023 and like public sentiment on Adam on Cosmos was pretty low post Adam 2.0 but I was like there we have this there's something coming there's a bunch of stuff coming that's very that's like exciting and is likely to have like a positive impact so this is 2023 post Adam 2.0 failing at the end of

2023 you have the dydx and Celestial launches but what's happening in the middle there and who are the are the players the same as they were the year before is it still osis informal iion Strange Love region had left informal and started Noble yeah Celestia had raised a lot of money in the bow market and now had become more and more of a player in the ecosystem the modular narrative was had really like really kind of hitting its stride yeah um because there was the first modular Summit actually I think in 2022 2022 was the first modular Summit 23 was the big the big one the big one pre yeah yeah yeah that was the one I was at actually was 2023 and so that was and that was so there was so much

excitement that was during ECC Paris and that whole venue everyone was like packing into it was so exciting it's and I I forget sometimes that that was pre-launch for Celestia yeah yeah so you know the L2 narrative was was kind of strong the shared sequencer stuff there was like lots of there were just all these modular things lots of tokens there was everything a lot of this you know sort of infrastructure Madness was kind of very strong in the v in like the VC investor community and there was a lot of energy yeah around that and like concretely we were like we're going to launch dydx it's going to really show

what this technology can do MH usdc is going to come to the ecosystem native Native usdc that's going to like inject a lot like restore a lot of liquidity to the ecosystem this is replacing what Luna had sort of destroyed because even though there were always stable coins but they were like bridged they were bridged Axel primarily yeah yeah yeah people were starting to like really engage with interoperability you know I was frustrated with the IBC team because they were not really FOC they were not really focused on majour they were not focused on outside of Cosmos all of that stuff but you know that was uh and so you know I helped co-found hyperlane as like a kind of IBC alternative in the that era and so yeah there had been like

a lot of there was just like a lot so there's a lot of stuff coming into the ecosystem that was like to be excited about even if you know there was this hope in my mind that would buy time for Adam to kind of figure itself out IC also launched in 2023 IC launched in 2023 and so at least you had that experiment in action yeah and some and the flaws of the IC product became apparent pretty quickly okay um it became Neutron had a lot of halts and stuff like that and that was like clearly a and like this idea of like not having a a very aligned validator set where you cuz the first version of IC

had to be opted in and the reality other reality of the situation was is that like it became very clear that people were not willing to pay projects were not willing to pay a lot of their tokens to use IC so like you know Neutron provided what you know ended up doing this like airdrop to the community pool which like the Hub can't figure out what to do with um and like no one knows what to do with stride is you know provides like a you know 10% of their fees or something like that some small percentage of their fees to to the H stakers and people are like I you know it's like all right what is this right the excitement that would then this was the first reaking thing but then enan

Weare starts their reaking process or like their walk their you know their contract that you could walk funds in on ethereum on ethereum and that becomes you know three then five then $15 billion right and like you're like no one no one remembers this IC thing yeah there's also like I don't know when but liquid staking on Cosmos yeah so I really really pushed liquid staking on Cosmos put years of work into that was earlier too that was 2022 that was 2022 I put years of work I put basically a year of work in addition to all my other things like I would be writing the code at like 2 am in the morning I really believed that liquid staking could really transform Adam um and make it

make it something that would make sense and be useful and become part of the wider Cosmos ecosystem and well I'm excited about drop um which is a new liquid staking project on Cosmos the 2023 liquid staking era was a big disappointment moving into 2024 so actually end of 20123 Celestia dydx lots of excitement people are excited early 2024 this year yeah still pretty so Celestial bu Market is still run still running strong like that airdrop narrative with Adam had continued um although that soured by March I think yeah like I don't know when starkware even I think and this is a so it's a

different ecosystem this is more like the ethereum side of things so it moves over to ethereum like the air drops that are coming early 20124 they don't perform as well but these are not Cosmos aird drops but it's still like like Celestia and I think there might have been one or two others but like it's still yeah so Celestia's airdrop to adom Holders did really well yeah yeah and people got really excited about it totally because it was unexpected and nobody really like could game it in the way that I mean I think there was this assumption like you should stake your atoms or you should stake osmosis maybe but there was no like big game yeah the Celestia air drop was well executed the celestial launch was well executed it was executed well in the same way that

like Adams you know most exchange list of it you know like it had a strong narrative strong Team all of this stuff like really good but come the new year there's these other airdrops in another ecosystem that sort of sour at least the spirit of airdrops people get a little bit more annoyed that sort of I mean in a way it's the false activity gets called out and shown for what it is but it also also never a reason for an asset to exist yeah like let's just like be like from my point of view I think what did people understand Cosmos assets as so like first there was just this like we don't really understand where the yields coming from we don't understand inflation we don't understand unit bias we don't understand any of this stuff

but we're like the Market's like well there I just get more atoms in my wallet you know and like I can do it from centralized exchanges and I can do all this stuff so it's like yield coin all right then people got retrained as this is airdrop coin okay so so you hold your asset because you might get yeah yous you stake your atom you hold it you might get air drops none of these things are sustainable reasons for anything to be valuable or exist yeah but those were do have been dominant narratives and in general as one would expect those narratives have been running out of steam and they sort of managed to keep them going for a

while by slightly altering the plan but yeah it was getting kind of into I think the ethereum airdrop story became more like there was just such a complex amount of activities that people are supposed to do they kept sort of adding like oh it's not just hold it in this asset now you have to do something you have to move it around like five times you have to spend this much you have to do that and everyone like a lot of people trying to guess what they're supposed to do yeah but on the Builder side for Cosmos the story started to become if you aird drop to atom holders all you do is get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of cell pressure for your asset that if you are lucky reproducing the success Celestia had with their airdrop as a on the Builder

side and so you know more and more teams started asking the question okay if I want to airdrop within Cosmos does it make sense to airdrop to Adam stakers do I want to look for users do I want to try and find other signs on chain that people are actually users because a big frustration that Builders had within Cosmos is is they would look at these numbers and they would be every builder in Cosmos would look at would look and say okay I see three 400,000 accounts sticking at them great I see 50 60,000 accounts swapping on osmosis you know on a month mhm my app has 100

users how do I grow how do I do anything and this was a problem that like every Builder was having um in Cosmos and so people started really there became this huge became a very strong misalignment between Adam stakers and like the Staker community in Cosmos and the Builder community in Cosmos W which I think again has propagated as a problem because it's like I want apps that people I want like all of the stuff depends on apps if apps have no users like why am I building in this ecosystem and if all of these people who are staking which who appear real like that like it's not just like you know it's not one

person with 400,000 accounts there's like at least a few hundred thousand people in this community but if those people can't be engaged to engage with any apps like what do we do yeah this summer summer 2024 seems like one of the lowest points for Cosmos yeah we're at an inflection point like and now so now we're recording this in September but I feel like a month ago two months ago you just started to see kind of core people like people in those teams that you've mentioned say things like I think it's dead it's over I think even like maybe you've tweeted something that suggested like it's over which I think my team at zkv like flagged being like whoa if

zucky thinks this so I mean I had this very famous tweet in 2023 that Cosmos has 12 months okay okay so it was March of 2023 and I was like Cosmos says 12 months mons to figure this stuff out otherwise we're screwed this is post adom 2.0 this is post adom 2.0 okay were you trying to prompt another adom 2.0 Movement Like were you trying to get another one I was trying to have to get people to understand there was this feel that there needs to be a view of Crisis basically what we had by so like a year from that was March of 2024 March of 2024 Celestia was still looking

pretty good m mhm uh dydx was growing very rapidly no well Noble usdc has continued to grow rapidly so again if the ecosystem is dead it's not because like here's a you there's lots of metrics that continue to show a lot of volume and engagement and stuff like that with the ecosystem but you're like you sit you're sitting there going I foresaw a crisis I saw that a crisis so it wasn't March 2024 but a little bit after that yeah so March 2024 the stuff good stuff that had happened was kind of disguising mhm a the sense of Crisis then weirdly how we got here in the summer was so in the spring we found another IBC bug it

turned out not to affect most chains okay it required a very particular set of IBC features but it was again an emergent property of multiple teams not working on a coherent design everyone adding little pieces and when you put these pieces together you had another vulnerability wasn't interchain G Bea supposed to be doing that though weren't they sort of meant to be like the IBC Center Point yes okay but no one can be the center point you had different users who wanted different things like one of the big problems that Cosmos has had is the teams were not very commercially oriented they were all these very like researchy oriented teams funded out of

the interchain foundation who are not you know so you have this kind of division in Cosmos right now between teams that were very commercially oriented Neutron skip in some sense is strange love me who are very commercially and then this like not very commercially oriented team so like users of the tech were like we are missing this feature and frequently the the the attitud like what you would get back from I mean again this is just my perspective but like on the whole what you would frequently get back from like The Interchange amb team is like yes we will work on that in two years right and everyone's like yeah that's not going to help for so I'm going to go find someone

Strange Love another vendor to make it to like but that's kind of dangerous then too right because that's when you get other teams adding yeah and like maybe it won't be vetted as much and checked and like in my mind we like created an entire design that was supposed to mitigate this bug like from at a design level and then that design was subverted because of incoherent designs so we get this bug again it gets wh- hated these wonderful people at asymmetric research who seem to be finding lots of Cosmos bugs um who seem great like report the bug through their our bug Bounty process like we get this bug Bounty the chains get patched now in June somehow well we kind of know how

sorry this is like a lot of stress oh no this is still fresh yeah so in June terara Terra Tera rears its head again rears its head and terara has reverted the fix oh so they reintroduced the bug that you guys had just fixed but just for the Tera just for the Tera chain but then terara gets exploited for like $6 million still on Tera though some people mostly this project that like was born out of Deli investment and like research team called astroport which is a DEX that competes sort of competes with osmosis um is still on and that has most of the

funds and so like literally I'm by back in the Tera validator Channel patching Tera again like I was in 2022 um and I'm like and like sunny and I were like both in there in this like War Room called to deal with the vulnerability and we're just like we're doing this again can't you just turn it off and not turn it back on like isn't this just like a good time to be done with the Terra Blake and we've had to do this somehow though in the social consciousness of crypto this vulnerability which was like on the whole a small exploit in but it's it's involves a very sensitive topic yes Tera

not just like Tera for you but also terara I think it triggers lots of people yeah and so so Tera broke again Tera broke again something something Cosmos something something IBC something something we don't really understand but we were just like Jesus Christ what is going on here okay and so this trigger is this like just Avalanche of like there had been in Cosmos circles negative sentiment kind of brewing for a long time but it like this somehow escapes the bubble and like triggers this like outpouring of negative sentiment that has just been sort of with us since then since then the teams going back to like who's still here in 2024 like where do they all stand

osmosis I mean osmosis has gone through Lots especially recently like lots of like announcements for kind of new directions so osmosis the team has just been grinding on the on the core product forever yeah well since 2021 since 2021 but I've been a Critic of Osmosis I think osmosis like when we got to this Rebirth of optimism in November osmosis did not show itself up osmosis went down during the Celestia air drop it like yeah people who used a lot of ethere people from outside of the ecosystem who got the Celestia air drop touched the cosmos ecosystem for the first time

touched osmosis had a bad experience what I would say is so it's about a year since then osmosis is now amazing yeah like osmosis they got it back on track osmosis is just like killing it okay from a product point of view like the the product is just unbelievably good like it's as good as any de I mean I use everything I use salani dexes I use Cosmos I use ethereum really the product is as good as anything out there nice um and like just and like the team has done such amazing work and it contributed a lot of amazing work they've fixed Comet bft tendermint bugs that I've been chasing for years um

you know just like amazing amazing fantastic work that has not been rewarded in any way shape or form by in token price or users or anything but there it's still [ __ ] amazing okay what about informal so informal has so informal took over the responsibility for in the beginning of 2023 for Comet bft and Cosmos SDK no oh okay so they own Cosmos Hub so the cosmos Hub team is informal so like yelen onboarded two teams stride in Neutron then no to IC to IC they announced Yello left informal executed

got them on board it watch them they've been running for more than a year there have been no new teams mhm the teams that informal has talked to about onboarding have all come back came back with a Litany of reasons why not to use it informal has dutifully worked on all of those problems and so there is a version of IC that is sort of about to launch um that like fixes a bunch of obvious problems but there is also absolutely very little reason to feel imminently excited about those product improvements it seems very it would it's like a huge lift to get from where we are today to something that would really get people excited about Adam in the

cosmos Hub through those product improvements what about Strange Love today so strange love is still a contributor to IBC I don't know like their main thing right now is so one of the things that's very exciting actually about Cosmos is so one of the biggest Cosmos chains oh actually that was it it wasn't live but they started building it before uh Cosmos Hub launched is called is Thor chain oh yeah is it also tendermint also tender everything so strange we is actually involved in this like massive project so thorchain while it was built with comic bft was never integrated into the IBC Network yeah yeah I think of it as very separate it's

very separate though it does have it integrates with adom but nothing else on Cosmos um for their for their various products and so Strang was actually involved in this massive project um to turn Thor chain into like a cosmos defi chain so Thor chain will have cosm wasm it will be connected to IBC it's like current product set and feature set um and you know JP who is one of the I guess is the founder of uh of thorchain who was a na non for many years though you know I start I met him in 2018 JP is like on a war path kind of a of launching products and building stuff and is you know and like there was this

Cosmos team called KIRO who were a terrrace Survivor who sort of had a financial meltdown also the summer who got bailed out by JP and now he's trying to like merge he's like merging Thor chain and this kuira product and you're getting this consolidation which was very exciting okay so you know that's what Strange Love is doing binary because we didn't really they sort of enter so there was this team region who had been responsible for a lot of the cosmos SDK work MH um post aib collapse and I personally was very unsatisfied and I think a number of other contributors were not super satisfied with regen work as Leaders um

and Marco who started in Cosmos as a devil's guy um took over as product lead and frankly quietly has made the cosmos SDK like a a state-of-the-art blockchain building toolkit and fixed numerous problems but it's basically taken 18 months of really really hard work from his team wow to like kind of turn Cosmos SDK into a truly state-of-the-art system nice so like a lot of Builders are very like this is what we see current generation of Builders is super excited about the cosmos SDK you know you have new projects that are like we raised $100

million and we're going to go use the cosmos SDK every like on a basis who was it story okay which I'm an adviser too oh and yet the summer we hear Cosmos is dead and when they say that do they mean Cosmos Hub do they mean Cosmos ecosystem yeah what does Co what does cosmos is dead mean then why is Cosmos dead or is it dead so I think what people very specifically mean is it's I no longer associate this as at Adam and Cosmos with the success of the ecosystem MH in a like meaningful way the

fragmentation of the ecosystem now has reached the point where it's like I realize that people will continue to be like there will still be a comet bft there will still will be uh IBC that IBC is the third largest bridging protocol by volume on defi Lama um but I can't I no longer have any reason to believe that Adam will gain any value from this so it's not Cosmos is dead it's Adam is dead yeah because anything else doesn't make any sense right like is Celestia dead no there's like new stuff launching on top of Celestia all the time is IBC dead no it's the third largest bridging protocol by volume yeah is uh is the

ecosystem dead no there's $270 million of usdc on Noble doing defi stuff is dydx dead no it's the second largest propex like obviously Cosmos isn't dead but what people are really saying is where does the attention go where does the what is the core of the ecosystem what is the what are the things to be excited about and this thing that like where it's primary property was its decentralization that was many people viewed as the which was to a lot of people the core of the ecosystem and the great part yeah is there's no there's nothing to be excited about or it's its own decentralization made it hard to have that Central

leadership yeah and so like you know one of the problems that I think and we we could get to like I mean it's probably a good time to kind of analyze how did we get here one of the reasons I think that we really got here was so all in bits the organization that we all worked at when we created Cosmos shambles MH interchain Foundation has gone through many iterations of turnover of core people of leadership is now off on a search for an executive director again oh is doing stuff there are there are talented people who work there I'm not trying to like you know be negative about everybody but it's been a deep

deeply there's also a governance proposal right now to like audit the ICF or like to or like to convince the Swiss to audit the ICF which I don't know exactly what the theory of like why the Swiss government cares about his proposals on the cosmos Hub but maybe they do um but also who knows if it'll pass I'm I'm not bullish this like auditing process but I was there's a sentiment of like anger towards the ICF there's a sentiment of anger towards the ICF yeah um that you see in the community that's the foundation the this is this is the thing that gives out grants this is the thing that like this is separate also from the community Hub doesn't really give out grants it funds these various fragmented development

organizations so used to do grants it used to do grants years ago I also was kind of part of the ICF during that small window of time when they were doing grants um but yeah so it's it's different from the Hub which is like more Community chosen um it has I mean I think this year there was a huge rearrange like last year Billy Sam left right is it 2023 Yep this year Brian leaves I don't know who else leaves but it seems like it seemed like there was another big shift yep absolutely okay um there's a lot of frustration that the ICF this non-commercial nature of the ICF and

that its delegation of commercial like informal is its own Commercial Business Strange Love is its own Commercial Business I left everything to do with the ICF at the beginning of 2023 I have nothing to do with it don't get any grants don't take any money I have like no connection to it I just like was like this leadership is a mess I don't want anything to do with it I think I was there in 2021 yeah but yeah so 2023 I like finally disassociated myself and just like was like nope I'm doing my own thing so this like this like frustration with the non-commercial nature of it where it's like what is our goal what are our metrics what what purpose are we serving our job right now is just to shovel money out the door at some rate

uh and you know not spend the entire treasury on one thing you know every other foundation in crypto that's well-run has some set of commercial goals or objectives some goals around adoption some goals around use some goals around distribution of the technology Etc um and the ICF never has has never had any of that and so this lack of commercially oriented leadership at the ICF has been a source of great frustration but don't don't all the foundations have that exact thing though like they're all meant to be nonprofit they're not supposed be super financially driven I mean EF yeah Foundation salana Foundation I guess salana Foundation Foundation what we're

seeing right now is salana running a very the salana foundation being far more attuned to the commercial needs of the ecosystem and just like doing a really good job like people come into salana they want to accomplish something they will get help from the salana foundation there will be people at the salana foundation who help them the salana foundation will have an opinion they will say this these initiatives are important these initiatives are not important there isn't this effort to please everyone and it has been I I it has shown I think really positive effects is it the only foundation that has such a strong showing so far because like EF is

currently and has been over the years like lambasted for paying too much or not paying enough or hiring too many people firing too many people the the EF in my mind is not very commercially oriented but pulled off such an astounding engineering feat with the merge and like proof of stake and all of this stuff which is just like unbelievable that they were able to pull something like that off um and but the fact that there has been very little commercial reward for that accomplishment like this is the this is the challenge that you have with crypto right you set some engineering goal the engineering goal is really hard you go do it and sometimes you don't get you

there's no commercial reward on any time Horizon but also sometimes the commercial rewards for those engineering Golds can be delayed by months or years sometimes you have people though be kind of like pleasantly surprised that they get a retroactive or whatever it's a weird space that way but it makes it hard like at the beginning to commit I guess although I think why have people committed in the past I think it's because there was an assumption that there would be something at the end of that Tunnel right yeah that way something would work out yeah you know you have a bunch of things something works out mhm we're like coming into like almost like basically you know a year plus of flat eat price salana going up but then flattening out like things have been

just like you know you no one feels super rewarded um for all of the hard work and that goes beyond Cosmos then that does goes beyond Cosmos the problems of Cosmos are are to the rest of the ecosystem as well MH I'll just cover like a third thing but and then loop back which is there's aib there's ICF and then there's the validators okay and in many ways the sort of weakness of aib and the weakness of ICF and the way the Builders of Cosmos ConEd of it is like we are turning this thing over to the validators but from the adom 2.0 era onward any sort of clear this is where we want this thing

to go this is what we should do from the validators you know they've never viewed it as their responsibility but at the same time there was no there was no one else and they had the power they had the power to reject everything and so everybody put has put so much time and energy trying to make incremental changes oh it's fun AA da let's incrementally improve let's you know come constantly test the waters of the validators because if we try to too fast the validator what we learned from 2.0 is the validators will just say no but like that was too like slow enough that the validators would accept as at this moment too slow to save the Markem it's funny so as a as mentioned as a validator especially

during that era where those votes were coming in we were like one of the few independent ones in the top 10 yeah like it really looked like it was exchange exchange VC strange like kind of company game game thingy like it was very strange weird Japanese investment vehicle that no one really understands and then yeah and I remember like we took a lot of those governance decisions especially the contentious ones very seriously and we like would have big conversations trying to figure out what to do there all the builders always viewed that DK validator vote as like one of the most reliable allies and with you guys gone we're just we we actually we don't know like I I don't know I don't know what's going to happen yeah

zkv in the last month or so has you know it's no longer in the top 10 we're still in the set but we don't have the same backing that we used to and felt when it changed as like a bit of an end of an era cuz we'd been up there for about 5 years almost but um yeah I do Wonder like who are the people cuz like even like if you look at the bigger VCS who had been there even VCS that could have been friendly they've been selling off yep like you don't see the Paradigm or the poly chain poly chains must be gone there still are I mean it's there's a lot of tokens like coinbase custody is the biggest validator but they never vote on anything they don't never vote on anything and you know it would be great if they were to you know because

it's mostly it's just like retail and like retail users on coinbase right but like they don't get any voting rights or anything which is just really frustrating we've tried yeah okay so now this brings us to today yeah Adam is dead Cosmos is not dead but in a funny situation the ICF is looking for new leadership and yet we hear little murmurings of proposals ideas one of them is public which is this osmosis merger so one thing that has been sort of you know is not in the form of a serious proposal but there is this idea of merge Adam and osmosis in some

fashion that has been out there and as I have said I've been very very positive about the product progress that osmosis has made and been very conscious of the complete lack of price action on osma right I think that another like frustrating thing for crypto builders in this last year not just in Cosmos but like just in general right is that's like product progress is very rarely rewarded with token activity like there's a few examples where people have been able to make both the token and the product work but like you know you are very hamstrung by the market realities these days um although you know 2019 I feel like you had a similar thing over

on ethereum yeah I remember like tools were getting better 2019 2020 and no one was using them like the things that had been blowing up in 2017 2018 all of a sudden worked but everyone was gone so you couldn't battle and they were all like meant to scale but no one was pushing their limits at all and the same thing happened in salana I think in in 2023 right like 2023 was salana Tech improved dramatically but there were no users and then users came so we've been through Cycles like this before I'm not I'm not you know it feels like 2019 in that sense um of nobody's like where's the light on the end of the tunnel on

the tokens or like do we have to you know I think you know simier for instance has just like committed self we're going to focus on Revenue because like who knows what whether or not we can make the token work or whether or not the token will ever work M um you know christe my co-founder had put out this like very nice uh oped about just like okay like can't control token can control Revenue can control Revenue can grow grow Revenue let's go focus on Revenue okay but the proposals so there's an osmosis atom like an osmo atom there's like a soft osmo atom merge proposal that is out there but you think it's not super serious I wonder if it's worth it to explore or if you think oh what I would say is the Dynamics of your which is osmo is now a great product and

osmo is very much the entry point for people into the ecosystem it is the most WID we used thing it has the most dayre active users although from centralized exchanges it's still atom right or is it more like eth into osmo so like one of the things another form of fragmentation that has occurred is there are multiple front doors to Cosmos okay so Noble is a front door because it has usdc from coinbase which is the only centralized exchange that supports hopefully more soon but we integrated this thing called cctp which is a bridging protocol that uh is native to usdc and that has provided you know like you can go salana Noble in under like a second right it's it's a so it's a new on-ramp so that's a

new on-ramp okay and then you have osmosis has gotten binance and multiple other exchanges to list osmo so there are multiple entry points now into the E and tia is another entry point into the ecosystem so now you have all these multiple entry points to the ecosystem but they all meet like you know like a good 30 40% of the usdc is on osmosis a good you know there's Tia volume there's uh there's atom volume a lot of this stuff happens on osmosis so osmosis is for users of the ecosystem very much now a hub a hub mhm I feel like it has been for a while but maybe more so now more so now okay because before Oso was on like was step two was defi okay but it

wasn't like where all of the different on-ramps met but now you have Tia Adam Noble all of them meeting in osmosis osmosis is much more and the Osmos is a much better product now um the ux is much better like the functionality of the decks is contemporary to like other dexes in the ecosystem so all that stuff is happening what would em merger look like I mean in my mind I tweeted this how does that even work so there would be the mechanics of it where there' have been very few mergers yeah um in crypto so the big recent one was this um merger of Fetch and ocean protocol and I think a third protocol fetch is actually a cosmos chain to this AGI asset where

they like you had like three things that have all pumped because of sort of AI okay the AI bubble um that have uh merged so there was that merging process you and I were talking just the other day about like the new Cipher plus keep no new yeah equals threshold yeah became threshold few years ago and that that's also happened um so that that merger has occurred uh very few mergers have happened one thing though that like has is a problem that I think Cosmos and all the other ecosystems are now having is everyone's incentives are new token new token new token you have this get this what I call fractalization of incentives where everyone has their own like token

with their own ecosystem which is their own thing so like and you have so many of those dking Cosmos you have like initia you have Celestia then you have initia then you have asria then you have starg then you have star you know thing after thing after thing after thing which is all producing their own ecosystems around them yeah and you're like okay like what is what are the incentives anymore now consolidation has to be the way that we put all of these incentives back together yeah I mean I even remember when every project you talk to I mean still kind of the case is about to launch a token and you have to ask yourself like how many of these things are we going to hold on to this is what everyone is this is what this is the general despair in the ecosystem in

Q3 of 2024 which is like you have a lot of the things that launched in the sort of period of that way where things were looking good October November December of 2023 now their onee past tge vesting unlocks start happening so there a huge amount of supply of different tokens coming into the market and then everyone who was like who thought they were going to launch in June July were like oh Market's looking bad I'm going to delay delay delay delay delay delay stuck now are now you know igen lare tokens are become going to become liquid tradable like all of these tokens suddenly so now you have this like another massive wave of tokens into a market that has just

like there there's no buy side whoa so you know it's a painful time not just for Cosmos that idea of merging tokens I mean I think this this proposal is osmo co like ad may or may not make sense but I think that generally that's a kind of good idea or like has has anyone like absorbed tokens like could one stronger token absorb another one I think polygon did that a little bit like Hermes token somebody could write a thing that would like for instance like allow people to deposit osmo and get vesting atom of some kind in like some module like you could build this like someone could build a cosmos merger smart contract

module whatever that like do this like and I suspect someone will eventually like so you would have the osmosis sort of like give itself over to the atom but what I would in my version of this the only version of this makes sense is like the entire atom product road map of today which is this IC product road map is abandoned The Hub product is the osmosis product The Hub asset is at but you'd have to how would you possibly do that you'd need the Buy in from the validators I guess you need the validators to say and now no one no one knows no independent is on the is like up there I guess so yeah we don't so you know you don't know well but like yeah

and not only you would need the osmosis validators and the Hub validators to agree and it's and these things are hard you know it it has manifested but this is just one of many plans that have that exist in some way can you share any others so or hint at I can hint at things so skip has a plan I think uh we'll see when this comes out whether or not you know this thing has leaked onto Twitter but I'm not going to be the one to leak it um if if so I think listeners should check your Twitter when this comes out and see if you've retweeted anything around a skip proposal for the future of Adam the more commercially oriented teams so I would view osmosis as a

commercially oriented team I would view skip as commercially oriented team they would say that there's like such demand for like what Cosmos makes which is like unability to build your own Sovereign chain now it's really unclear exactly what a hub asset should do in that world because sovereignty is like all about doing your own thing why do I need why wouldn't it just follow like the Unis swap model though if it is sort of like defi I guess you don't think of it as that anymore no now it's Center so all what I would say is is like the demand for sovereignty is huge again like all of these problems with Cosmos and like

story bar chain all of these people are building with Cosmos Tech Babylon a lot of the things that are like late this year early next year that people are actually excited about in spite of like this massive supply of tokens and everything the stuff people are actually excited about so many of them are built with Cosmos Tech um and you know so many of them are I'm investor adviser or whatnot like I've been very much like you know I shifted out of Cosmos core and I put all my energy into like the more commercially oriented stuff um which has been a struggle making it work like it would have been it would have just been far easier to build infrastructure and live off the ICF but like I like threw myself like both me

and Christy like threw ourselves into this Vortex of trying to like make commercially oriented things work in Cosmos because we were like the ecosystem will die without more commercially oriented stuff so we worked on Celestia we worked on Babylon chain we work on par chain like very very commercial teams last question because I know we're almost at time so you've talked about some of the proposals for how to kind of save Adam or Cosmo I mean Cosmos isn't dead from what I'm hearing but it's it's not booming and Adam is somewhat dying like people are there's like people selling there's people on delegating I mean we saw that but so far you shared

like a few there's some proposals to fix it or turn around so there's still like a desire to do that but my actual last question is like when would Cosmos actually be dead what would it be what does that picture look like so the the picture of Cosmos being dead okay so like another sort of meme out there is the cosmos ification of the rest of crypto okay so salana the new buzzer word is Network extensions which is Cosmos which are Cosmo which are sovereign chains that extend the salana network but like rollups they're bit like rollups they're bit like Cosmos chains whatever you want like I I don't know I have not read a formal definition of what a network extension is it's just branding that is different from l2s okay

then people are like the cosmos ification of ethereum like eth is the new atom like meme is out there right ethereum does feel like Cosmos now it's like you have the fractalization of incentives where everyone has a different L2 everyone has a different token the core devs get sucked up or you know scattered across multiple l2s yeah ethereum Foundation is not you know the abss are going to do more of that even you have core ethereum Foundation people get doing like igen we advisory and like all of this other stuff and like the the revenue you know like the funniest thing is like you know there were so many people who were pushing this like atom as gas as the solution to atams problems and you see that e adds like the tiniest

little bit of scalability and like protocol fees drop to like nothing right so what would the death of Cosmos really look like it's probably that the cosmos idea doesn't go away because I do think Cosmos has a mechanism of giving developers sovereignty this ability of like or like the idea that developers want sovereignty the developers are not going to just accept that the choice have already been made for them you must build with the evm you must build with the svm you must launch on top of the salana network with the salana consensus you must pay your meev to the ethereum validators or salana validators you must do it in this prescribed way and there

are no other options will never be the way that the most ambitious Builders want to build and so the dream you don't think will die the dream will not die but the death of Cosmos is people no longer use Comet bft IVC Cosmos SDK for this there are no more stories or bear chains or or you know celesti or anything there's no there's no future pipeline of all of that and I guess the teams that you mention closeup shop or they shift they start working on other things yeah but currently doesn't look like that's the case we're not there yet okay do you have another time frame another timeline do you have a 12 month six month 3 months I mean I do think that the ecosystem

what what the biggest question is is is Adam relevant to the Future at all I think at this moment and I think there may or may not even get to be a decision point for this I think is the question like you know it may be that just again the more commercially oriented teams in the ecosystem just decide that they want to build something outside of the framework of the ICF and are just like let us move on and then it may be more of a uh individual decision adom holders it's like do I stick with the Legacy stuff or do I move on but I think the question is more is like the ecosystem needs to be at a really fundamental level restructured and re uh uh

consolidated and new incentive patterns need to be created in a much like Adam 2.0 way but I do think that the appetite among Builders to ask the validators now is pretty low they may get one more chance they we may get one more ask and it's like but it will be a very like take it or leave it and if leave it as the answer we have here's our here's our very established plan of being done with it whoa I I think people will be surprised at the willingness to do something big cool on that note zucky thanks for this Epic Journey back in time to the beginning of Cosmos all the

way to today some sort of hints at what might be coming and uh I mean I think there's lessons to be learned for kind of anyone in the space from also stories of the cosmos yeah it's it's really cool I mean people like you know like chain Yodo like tweet always about like learn from Cosmos because you are all walking down this path but also learn from polka dot but yeah yeah but like I'm not good at like writing all this stuff out so it was a really good opportunity to like embed all of my experience and earnings and Trauma into a single a single podcast that we'll hopefully you know the AI can like learn from nice thanks suaki I want to say thank you to the

podcast team Rachel Henrik and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for listening